Video Transcript

Host:
Question: What Degree Do You Need To Become An X Ray Tech?

Jennifer:
Answer: Our governing board, which is the ARRT, the American Registry of Radiologic technologists, have now changed the requirements where you associates degree to the registry board. Before it was a certificate program, but you still have to complete the program before you could even sit for it. A technician is someone who can just trained on the job and has a limited set of skills. But we’ve actually gone to school to study exactly what we are doing.

In addition to that, I’m required to do continuing education credits every two years. We have to submit them. And this year for that tenure, I was saying I graduated 10 years ago and this I was the first graduating class that they now require. Every year they require that right after 2012 to reset for like a registry board. So it’s not so much exactly like I have to take my boards all over again, but very required us to go through and reexamine where our knowledge is. And if you need a refresher in it, in addition to our normal 22 work continuing education credits.

Farrel:
Answer: According to my professors, everyone is starting to gravitate more towards the bachelors needing bachelors for things. You can have an associate if you’re going to continue on with schoolwork and get other modalities. Ct technologist is actually a pretty easy step after you have a bachelor’s degree in radiologic technology. There’s not a whole lot more clinicals, MRIs kind of the same. If you were to go into nuclear medicine or add ultrasound or radiation therapy, it requires more and lots of those programs. Post education or whatever they call it, most of them want you to have the bachelor’s. So you have to actually, if you only have an associate’s, you have to go get your bachelor’s at the same time, too, because there’s a lot more learning in those.

Jenna:
Answer: So the field is called radiography. So depending where you’re going to school, some have a certificate programs and have an associates. Some have a bachelor’s. So I guess it just depends how much education you want and what you plan to do long term. Obviously, if you one day want to be a lead technologist or maybe a supervisor or a manager, then you want to at least get a minimum of your associates so that you have the ability to work towards that bachelor’s. You only need a certificate from an accredited program in order to sit for that HRD registry. But if it were me recommending, I would say at least get a minimum of an associate’s so that you have something you can do with that later.